Our Future Musicians

Bert Stratton tells his son, “Don’t go to music school” (Op-Ed, June 13). Is Mr. Stratton right in saying it’s a tough, competitive, rapidly changing landscape for music? Yes, he is.

Before running a major music school, I managed top-tier orchestras and have seen firsthand that the requirements of being a successful musician increasingly mean having a set of skills that begin with mastery of your instrument but go way beyond it to include being an effective communicator, educator, entrepreneur, audience development expert and citizen-artist.

Music is essential. It is unimaginable to live in a world without it. If music is going to thrive, we need trained musicians attuned to their communities, prepared for a changing landscape and leading the way rather than being led by it.

Music schools have come late to the fact that we are in a very different world, and are now just starting to confront those new realities. The performing arts are looking to this next generation of musicians, and the schools that train them, to ensure the vitality of those arts.

FRED BRONSTEIN

Baltimore

The writer is dean of the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University.